I Want Your Sex begins at maximum alarm: a naked body in a pool, a bloodied man in pink lingerie, and detectives waiting for an explanation. It is an opening that promises mess, danger and enough awkward evidence handling to make everyone wish they had worn gloves. The film then steps back through Elliot’s account of the week that led him there, turning a crime-shaped frame into an erotic, off-kilter relationship story.
Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, an aimless young man hired as an assistant by Olivia Wilde’s Erika Tracy, an artist with a commanding presence and very particular ideas about work-life balance. Before long, Erika invites Elliot into a sexual relationship that is partly connected to her art and partly about pleasure. Their dynamic gives the film its voltage: Elliot is eager, inexperienced and searching for certainty, while Erika controls the terms without giving away much of herself.
The material approaches BDSM with a screwball snap rather than a grimly clinical stare. Commands, blindfolds and Elliot’s escalating intoxication with this hidden side of his life are played for excitement, discomfort and comedy in shifting measures. That tone is a key strength. The film sounds deliberately excessive, but not merely interested in provocation for its own sake; its sexual encounters are tied to Elliot’s hunger for validation and a clearer sense of who he is.
Hoffman reportedly makes that need easy to read. Elliot may carry the outward signals of a modern liberal young man, but his confidence is shakier than the laptop sticker suggests. His unenthused girlfriend Minerva, played by Charli xcx, sharpens the contrast between his ordinary life and the charged secrecy of his work with Erika. Wilde, meanwhile, gets considerable mileage from withholding. Erika has limited backstory, yet her cool control and occasional tenderness keep Elliot—and the audience—leaning in.
The film also places Elliot’s confusion in a broader generational context. His podcast discussion of conflicted feelings about sex, intensified by the pandemic, gives the central arrangement more emotional texture than a simple power-play premise. Erika becomes, for Elliot, an apparent answer to questions he cannot quite articulate. The problem is that the movie appears more comfortable raising those questions than pressing them to a deeper conclusion.
Its opening mystery keeps the plot moving, but the eventual resolution is described as spirited and ambiguous rather than fully satisfying. That leaves the ending feeling somewhat stiff beside the earlier fizz. Still, the journey has enough heat, wit and committed performances to make the imperfect landing less of a deal-breaker. This is a charged comeback built around an uneasy proposition: sometimes the most revealing thing a character can say is “yes,” especially when they have not worked out what they want it to mean.
